ANAHEIM, Calif. -- John McCain is not alone out here as an insurgent trying to steer his party in a less exclusive direction. He just acts that way, which is one reason his survival as a presidential candidate is in such doubt.
The truth is there are Republican insurgencies all over this megastate today, as you'd expect in a party that got beat badly for governor two years ago, hasn't won a US Senate election in a dozen years, and was trounced twice by Bill Clinton in the '90s. The California insurgencies are very much like McCain's - less right-wing on social issues, less doctrinaire on domestic topics, beginning with taxes, more hospitable to reform of the campaign money system, but still unmistakably Republican.
By making the presidential campaign too much about himself and about George W. Bush's crude efforts to crush him, especially in the month since his dramatic launch out of New Hampshire, McCain has lost a golden opportunity to plug into something that, as he says in his stump speech, is greater than his own self-interest.
Right here in the center of California Republicanism, Orange County is full of reformers attempting to burrow into the source of lasting grass-roots power - county Republican committees whose members are elected.
For decades these institutions have been dominated by a hard-working, superconservative organization called the California Republican Assembly. And from them have come the legislative and county candidates who have formed the conservative core of the state party. This year the assembly is being challenged all over the state. In Orange County, insurgents are challenging for 42 GOP committee slots in seven legislative districts, seeking to dislodge many of the 36 incumbents.
Nearby, in Riverside County to the east of Los Angeles, 31 more candidates are scrambling to fill slots in four more districts. The insurgents go by different names - Republicans for New Directions and the New Majority Committee, for example.
They resemble McCain's insurgency in every important way but one: Many are supporting Bush, won over back in the days when the Texas governor was a ''compassionate conservative'' or upset that McCain has reached outside the party and not made common cause with them.
The best examples involve umbrella volunteer organizations that have competed against the right-wingers in California for years. The biggest, the California Congress of Republicans, has actually endorsed Bush along with Senate candidate Tom Campbell, a moderate on social issues.
McCain has also failed to penetrate the other large home for raging moderates, the California Republican League. This organization is more openly ideological. It is prochoice on abortion and is a rallying point for GOP environmentalists. Most relevant to McCain, it views paying off the national debt as a higher priority than slashing income taxes.
The league's members complain that McCain has done nothing to reach out to them. Some also complain about his statement of support for a ballot initiative intended to oppose gay marriages. The only link to a presidential campaign on the league's Web site is to Bush's.
I was with McCain last fall when he went to Sacramento to endorse a campaign finance reform initiative similar to efforts that have succeeded in other states, notably Maine and Arizona, and supported by a politically hyperactive high-tech businessman, Ron Unz, who in turn supported McCain. Since then the reform effort has been hit from the left as well as the right, and it may fail today. McCain has done virtually nothing since his first visit to link his national crusade to that of the California reformers. Many of the reformers say McCain's statewide vote will fall well short of their initiative's.
McCain is also expected to come in well below the overall vote for Tom Campbell's long-shot (in November) effort to unseat Senator Dianne Feinstein. The Silicon Valley congressman and former state senator is one of the last of the true-believing supply siders: He favors abolition of the income tax and its replacement by a national sales tax exempting food and medicine.
In the primary, however, he is soft-pedaling economics in favor of his moderate reformer issues: against the anti-gay marriage proposition, for gun control, abortion rights, normal trade relations with China, and campaign finance reform. He is heavily favored in the open primary (where all votes count, in contrast to the party-rigged presidential voting) to beat two right-wingers for the right to face Feinstein in the fall. He is also favored to outperform McCain substantially despite the fact that their basic appeal is to the same constituencies.
The campaign McCain has waged down the stretch - about Bush's smash-mouth tactics and the hateful attacks against McCain by the religious right - has succeeded only in mobilizing the right.
The core of the Bush vote today will be conservatives. But if McCain loses the overall vote and any rational basis for staying in the race, the margin of defeat will come from many of those earnest Republicans battling the right-wingers for slots on the Orange County central committee. His campaign should have been about them; instead it was about him.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
